Haze, fog, smoke, moisture and other particulates in the atmosphere can obscure details in an image of an outdoor scene due to light absorption and scattering. The irradiance received by the camera from the scene is attenuated along the line of sight. As a result, the degraded images lose contrast and color fidelity, such as seen in FIG. 1A. Haze removal is highly desired in both consumer/computational photography and computer vision applications. Removing haze from the image can significantly improve the visibility of the scene and correct the color shift, which makes the photo much more visually pleasing. Haze removal can also be used to recover scene depth, which can benefit many computer vision applications and advanced image editing tasks that interpret the content of the scene. However, some existing haze removal techniques produce images that suffer artifacts resulting from, among other things, noise boosting, excessive de-hazing, and incorrect color shifts. Thus, there is a need for improved haze removal techniques that produce acceptable results for a variety of image processing applications.